piece where he was complaining about the appalling rate of gun deaths in the US. There is no quarreling with the fact that 14,000+ people were killed both intentionally, unintentionally, and through deliberate acts of suicide by gun in the US in 2012. That's what the FBI statistic shows. There is also no way to make that look better by messing with or distorting the statistics of other countries. The discussion below is directly to this point:
http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checking-ben-swann-is-the-uk-really-5-times-more-violent-than-the-us/
"What Swann either doesn't know, or simply doesn't bother to tell his viewers, is that the definitions for "violent crime" are very different in the US and Britain, and the methodologies of the two statistics he cites are also different. (He probably simply doesn't realize this: it appears that he lifted his data wholesale from a story in the Daily Mail, without checking it-something you might expect a fact checker to have done.)
"First, it should be noted that the figures Swann gives are out of date: in 2010, according to the FBI, the reported rate of violent crime in the US was 403 incidents per 100,000 people-the 466 figure comes from 2007. Second, and more importantly, the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports defines a "violent crime" as one of four specific offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
'The British Home Office, by contrast, has a substantially different definition of violent crime. The British definition includes all "crimes against the person," including simple assaults, all robberies, and all "sexual offenses," as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and "forcible rapes."
'When you look at how this changes the meaning of "violent crime," it becomes clear how misleading it is to compare rates of violent crime in the US and the UK. You're simply comparing two different sets of crimes. In 2009/10, for instance (annual data is from September to September), British police recorded 871,712 crimes against persons, 54,509 sexual offenses, and 75,101 robberies in England and Wales. Based on the 2010 population of 55.6 million, this gives a staggeringly high violent crime rate of 1,797 offenses per 100,00 people.
'But of the 871,000 crimes against the person, less than half (401,000) involved any actual injury. The remainder were mostly crimes like simple assault without injury, harassment, "possession of an article with a blade or point," and causing "public fear, alarm, or distress." And of the 54,000 sexual offenses, only a quarter (15,000) were rapes. This makes it abundantly clear that the naive comparison of crime rates either wildly overstates the amount of violence in the UK or wildly understates it in the US.
'Due to fundamental differences in how crime is recorded and categorized, it's impossible to compute exactly what the British violent crime rate would be if it were calculated the way the FBI does it, but if we must compare the two, my best estimate would be something like 776 violent crimes per 100,000 people. While this is still substantially higher than the rate in the United States, it's nowhere near the 2,034 cited by Swann and the Mail. [Elsewhere I noted that statistics for Assaults were not available in the sources I had found for US crime, primarily because they are adjudicated at the State and local level and the statistics aren't reported in the same way by US officials.]
"America has a much higher murder rate than other OECD countries, including Great Britain.
"Besides the misleading data Swann used, it's interesting to note the statistics he didn't give you. For instance, Swann correctly pointed out that it is no surprise the UK has fewer shooting deaths than the US, since handguns are almost totally banned. But he neglects to mention that Britain doesn't just have fewer gun-related homicides-it has a dramatically lower murder rate all around. In 2010, the US had an average murder rate of 4.8 murders per 100,000 people-4 times higher than the UK's rate of 1.2 per 100,000, and, coincidentally, the exact opposite of the impression that Swann gives viewers.' "
So this "fact checker" Ben Swann, who isn't the one who fabricated the 800% figure (his was 500%), has himself vastly over counted the UK crime rate and the murder rate. And the skeptical libertarian who wrote the blog says he's a libertarian or so he claims, meaning despite his criticism of Swann, he doesn't really want to find results which will indicate that a form of government he despises, i.e. a socially active one like Britain's produces better, safer conditions for all of the people of Britain, and better outcomes than are demonstrable in the US.
Now this whole issue was raised in order to point the finger at Britain in order to make Americans, or at least some Americans like the original poster feel better about things in the US or superior to somebody. else A far larger issue is the underlying fear and discomfort that Americans seem to feel about their own safety which gives rise to these exercises in whistling in the dark and grossly distorting the figures. Continuing to refuse to even look at the issue of how seriously the ownership of guns by roughly 1/3 of the public has become an issue which affects the Health of 100% of the Nation, i.e. it has indeed become a Public Health issue, seems awfully stupid. I don't know where gun deaths come in the over-all scheme of deaths in the US, but it seems likely that it ends the lives of children and adolescents and young adults more frequently than any disease, infectious or otherwise, and possibly more than traffic accidents. There aren't a lot of old people being shot unless there are unreported clashes of streetgangs of Pensioners fighting it out in alleys. There are certainly a lot of younger ones being killed by guns.
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age-and-gender
Homicide is the 6th highest cause of death in the 0-14 year old population, the 4th highest in the 15-24 age group, and the 4th largest in the 25 to 34 age group. Only then does it drop precipitately. Children and young adults are killed disproportionately by guns over any other age group. In any other country that would be a scandal and a source for outcry. In the United States it is sloughed off as "The price of freedom", as those who continue to distort the reasoning behind the 2nd Amendment insist. I'd be inclined to call it a tax on the US populace levied by gun manufacturers and ammunition manufacturers and paid for in the lives of America's children. I'd also call it grotesque and indefensible. Only Poisoning, Suicide and Road Traffic Accidents come higher on the list for that group.
Ted